36 BladeSymphony 1000 Architecture White Paper www.hitachi.com

Chapter 7

Chassis, Power, and Cooling
The BladeSymphony 1000 chassis houses all of the modules previously discussed, as well as a passive
backplane, Power Supply Modules, Cooling Fan Modules, and the Switch & Management Modules.
The chassis and backplane provide a number of redundancy features including a one-to-one
relationship between server blades and I/O modules, as well as duplicate paths to I/O and switches. In
addition, although the backplane is the only single point of failure in the BladeSymphony 1000, it
intentionally uses a passive design that eliminates active components that might fail. The backplane
provides connections between server blades, SCSI HDD Modules, PCI slots, FC HBAs, and LAN
switch, thus eliminating a large number of cables, which reduces costs and complexity.
Two types of chassis are available, chassis A and chassis B. Chassis A provides connections between
each server blade slot and two slots in a PCI module or Embedded Fibre Channel Switch Module.
Chassis B provides four connections from server blade slots #1 to #4 to two slots in a PCI module or
Embedded Fibre Channel Switch Module. The connections for both chassis types are illustrated in
Figure26. The specifications for each chassis type are listed in Table 10.
Figure26. Chassis backplane connections
Table 10: Chassis specifications
Module Type A Type B
Server Blade • Intel Xeon Server Blades: 8
max.
• Intel Itanium Server Blades:
8 max.
• Intel Xeon Server Blades:
8 max. (4 exclusive
against storage modules)
• Intel Itanium Server
Blades: 8 maximum with
network boot
Storage Modules: HDD x 3 N/A 4 maximum
Storage Modules: HDD x 6 N/A 2 maximum
LAN0
LAN1
Switch Module
#1
Switch Module
#2
Server blade #1
Server blade #2
Server blade #3
Server blade #4
Server blade #5
Server blade #6
Server blade #7
Server blade #8
Chassis Model A
LAN0
LAN1
Switch Module
#1
Switch Module
#2
Server blade #1
Server blade #2
Server blade #3
Server blade #4
Server blade #5
Server blade #6
Server blade #7
Server blade #8
Chassis Model B